Chuck Roberts-Year of China

            Chuck Roberts is a former CNN news anchor and has had the opportunity to teach media classes in China. Learning about his experiences was entertaining. It is interesting to find out all the differences another country has compared to our own. His students were not English speaking and he had to have a mandarin translator to relay the information he was teaching. This meant that he would have to speak a sentence, pause, wait for the translator to repeat the message, and then he could continue on with his lesson. That is something you would not find in America very often. That would be a lot of work and dedication to sit through a class with a professor you did not even have a common language with. Sadly, most American students would not be willing to go this extra mile and would not experience classes like this. Another thing I found interesting was the Chinese perception of Americans. He shared with us that Americans are seen as almost celebrities over there. They are not accustomed to seeing blonde haired people and will even take pictures with them if they come across them. This would be very odd for us to do since we are so used to seeing many differences in each person all over the county. As he described the way meals went in China, it was also a very big difference. While we may all sit around the dinner table and pass around food to each other, it would almost always be just enough food with hardly any leftovers. The way he was describing it was that there was obviously more food prepared and set out in front of them than there were people to eat it. Overall I really enjoyed Chuck Robert’s presentation. It was clear that he enjoyed what he was doing and loved being over there. He is even still in contact with one of his students over there. They will email him for advice on their works and even though they share no common language, it is still possible for them to communicate.